I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors. I think this counts as a sign of their ongoing transformation to be more than a game/even software company as they now own hardware and a platform for it

I can't tell if you're serious about "Valve as big enough"

Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.

Valve used contractors and third party studios already for the expansions of the original Half-Life.

They are now a corporation with hundreds of employees and equity in the billions of US dollars.

I have a company with ~0 market cap and ~0 turnover. Funnily enough it doesnt have a full time accounting, legal team and IT team - those are all contracted out.

I think they keep a low profile, being a private company and all.According to wikipedia they only had 360 employees (in 2016, that might be more if they opened up a hardware division. But the fact the numbers are from 2016 also underlines how it's a private, low profile company).

I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.

>I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors.

I don't think this is as simple as "require contractors". It's more along the lines of compensating specific people to work on specific things.

I think what they're implying is that the difference here is that they're not Valve employees. For instance, I know that Valve pays Codeweavers to improve Windows compatibility.

Shall we call them... "Uber Devs"?

Yes, I think that's what they're implying as well. All of the companies I mentioned do the same thing to a greater or lesser extent, so it's a pretty well-known practice in open source.

That isn't to say it isn't worthwhile that Valve is doing it, and the article kinda sorta touches on the scale of Valve's activities, but not really. Okay, they've contracted over a hundred devs to work on OSS projects that they rely on. Are those all full-time contracts, or part time? How long are they contracted for? How does that compare to other companies that have similarly contracted devs to work on OSS projects they rely on? As is, the article is essentially "water is wet" for anybody who pays any attention to the interaction between OSS and enterprise. I learned far more pertinent details from one comment[0] on another HN thread on this a couple days ago. PC Gamer couldn't find one of the contracted devs and ask them two or three questions to give some substance to the article?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34031431

At least in my perception, Red Hat, Google and Intel too mostly contribute to open source by having their own engineers work on their own open source projects, keeping full control. Valve, on the other hand, appears to contribute to making existing projects better, respecting their existing ideas, and even funding the existing contributors rather than "wedging their way in" and taking control of the projects themselves. Which makes it a somewhat different approach and therefore newsworthy.

Wasn't Google a big sponsor of Xiph and/or Theora at one point?

Yeah I do think they have a couple of projects like that, but it's not the first thing I think of when I think of Google and open source. Possibly it's a comparatively small part of what they do?

"Software company A pays software company B to develop open source software that company A relies on".

Seems pretty good open source success story to me?

Yep. I really hope that the Steam Deck line will be a smashing success going forwards. Because Valve has set the whole thing up exactly in the way that most benefits the broader industry and consumers as whole as opposed to extracting all the value for themselves, and it would be great if this was actually rewarded.

Perhaps because they view the people using the device as their primary (or perhaps only) customers?

As opposed to a lot of other hardware manufacturers, where the end-user is 'part of the ecosystem', along with advertisers, and other 3rd parties.

Microsoft and Sony certainly look at Xbox end users (aka gamers) a bit differently than Valve does. They need to keep publishers and advertisers happy. Valve has one audience...others have three (maybe more!?).

Yeah, I hope I wasn't implying that it's not?

A new company appears and in a few years invests in the open source Linux desktop as much as the few big incumbents do.

That is exciting!